The present invention relates to a system and method of estimating future repair costs for a plurality of different types of vehicles, over a defined period.
Automotive repair is, for the most part, inevitable. If driven long enough, most automobiles will require at least some form of routine maintenance and repair. Although repairs are almost certain, it is unknown as to when the vehicle will fail and, therefore, automotive failure usually comes as a surprise. Furthermore, the average vehicle owner does not know what those failures are likely to be or what the related cost of repair would entail.
The difficulty in predicting repairs for a vehicle is complicated by the fact that different vehicles exhibit different vulnerabilities. As such, a particular component may be susceptible to failure in a particular vehicle, and not as susceptible to failure in another model of vehicle. Furthermore, that same component may have a different susceptibility of failure from one model year to the next in the same model of vehicle. Thus, there is not a universal template or formula that can be accurately applied to all vehicles for predicting when failure is likely to occur.
A consumer considering a purchase of a used vehicle can use different sources of information to evaluate the repair history and the general reliability of a vehicle. Services such as Polk®, CarFax®, AutoCheck® and others can provide information relating to a vehicle's title record, accident record, repair record, and other historical data. Information concerning the current diagnostic condition of a vehicle can be extracted from a vehicle by using a scan tool, to evaluate the current operating condition.
Information sources such as Consumer Reports® provide a general rating respecting the reliability of particular vehicles. However, that information does not provide a quantification of expected future repair costs over a defined period and does not identify particular repairs that are anticipated for specific vehicles, or the mileage at which those repairs are likely to become necessary. Consequently, the currently available information services, while useful to generally evaluate a vehicle, is insufficient to provide a specific quantification of the costs of purchasing and operating a particular type vehicle, having a specific mileage, over a defined period of time.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a method and system of determining the cost of maintaining a used vehicle over a defined period of time or mileage, where the vehicle identifying information and the vehicle's current mileage are the only information necessary to derive a baseline estimate of expected repair costs.